title: Setting generalization of question-asking by children with autism.
abstract: We examined whether motivational procedures incorporated into teaching question-asking to children with autism, who lack verbal initiations, would result in generalization without additional teaching, prompting, or reinforcement in other settings. Specifically, we assessed whether such children could learn to use questions and whether the spontaneous use of question-asking would generalize across stimuli, settings, and people. All children learned to use questions in relation to items they had previously been unable to label and demonstrated generalization of spontaneous question-asking to new items and to their home environments with their mothers, with concomitant gains in expressive vocabulary. Results were discussed in terms of teaching response strategies, such as question-asking, to promote spontaneous child-initiated social interactions and expressive language development.
authors.affiliation: Autism Research Center, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106-9490, USA.
authors.forename: L K
authors.initials: LK
authors.lastname: Koegel
authors.forename: S M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Camarata
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Valdez-Menchaca
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Koegel
mesh_terms: D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D013663:Teaching